Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [1]
Then in January 2001, I suffered a terrible bout of tonsillitis. Anyone who has experienced it will testify to the excruciating agony. I couldn’t eat, talk, breathe or swallow, let alone smoke. For the first time in over twenty years, I went a whole day without smoking. To my astonishment, my head didn’t explode, the earth continued its orbit around the sun and the universe did not disappear down a black hole.
I made the mistake of mentioning this to my wife who promptly suggested that I might think about going to an Allen Carr’s Easyway seminar. She had quit back in 1992, just before we met, by reading the first edition of this book. Being the wonderful, thoughtful and caring person she is, she never tried to ram it down my throat, or threaten to leave me if I didn’t quit. But she knew that one day I would be ready to quit and I will forever be in her debt for making that suggestion that I attend the seminar. I can only think that the pain meds slightly scrambled my thinking, and I agreed to go.
At the time (January is our busiest period, with all those New Year Resolutions!) there was a long waiting list to attend and so I was notified that I would be attending on February 21st 2001. Of course, by that time my tonsillitis was long gone, I was back smoking heavily and had no intention of quitting. On the morning of the seminar, I told my wife that I was thinking of not going, but the look on her face told me otherwise (if you knew my wife you would know that when she gives you ‘the look’, you don’t mess with her). Eventually I agreed to attend, but I told her I was attending not to quit smoking, but to get our money back (all Allen Carr centers offer a money-back guarantee). “Whatever”, she said, giving me the look once more.
At one o’clock that day I found myself sitting in Allen Carr’s center in Raynes Park, near Wimbledon, just outside London along with seventeen other terrified smokers. I could barely see Cris, the facilitator, through the blue fog of smoke (in those days attendees were able to smoke throughout the session, today, due to smoking by-laws, the sessions now feature regular smoke breaks).
Five minutes into the session I remember thinking ‘If I’m stuck in this room for the next five hours, I may as well listen to what these guys have to say.’ I listened to Cris talk about smoking, about quitting and about nicotine. There were no scare tactics, no pictures of diseased lungs and no guilt trips. Despite thinking that I already knew everything there was to know about smoking, many of the concepts he explained were completely new to me—I had just never really thought about smoking this way before. I found myself agreeing with everything he said. As the day wore on, I found my desire to smoke faded. By the time Cris instructed us to smoke our final cigarette, I could barely light it.
But I was dreading leaving the seminar because I knew that as soon as I got in my car to drive home, the terrible cravings would come—after all, I used to chain-smoke in my car. The cravings didn’t come. I remember thinking that was odd, but not all that surprising because I had just spent five hours smoking heavily. After dinner, I thought—that’s when they’ll come. They didn’t.
As I smoker, I used to light a cigarette as soon as I woke up, then stumble downstairs to spark up some coffee. I wasn’t even human until at least my second coffee and my third cigarette. The following morning I didn’t even think about smoking. Lighting a cigarette literally did not occur to me. I was stunned.
Smoking had gone from being the center of my life to being a total irrelevance in just five hours. I couldn’t believe it, and neither could my family, my friends and colleagues. The only person who wasn’t surprised was my wife, who just shrugged her shoulders and said: “See, it’s easy!”
The changes in my life came thick and fast. I felt truly free and truly happy for the first time in years. I had more energy, I lost weight.